I find it incredibly fascinating in this modern era of satellite surveillance, military drones and NSA wiretaps, that the entire world has apparently lost a Boeing 777 airplane carrying 239 people. How do you lose an entire airplane, people?

Even keeping in mind that disabling the plane’s communication was likely an intentional act (though not an easy thing to accomplish), I’m still finding it hard to believe that an airplane could just disappear.

In a way I find this almost encouraging, a silver lining in what is obviously a tragedy for hundreds of families whose loved ones are aboard. We keep hearing about the global surveillance apparatus, that a person can no longer “disappear,” that individuals are being monitored and tracked and observed a thousand different ways to Sunday, that satellites and drones can monitor your movements from hundreds if not thousands of miles away. And yet, 239 individuals just vanished off the face of the earth, despite all of this. Despite the cell phone tracking and the satellites and the military monitoring and drones which can scour the face of the earth, an airplane full of people has vanished.

I don’t get it.

Part of me feels like this is all an elaborate hoax designed by Hollywood to promote the new movie version of “Lost.”

8 responses to “Mystery & Irony”

Yesterday, on some news program, I heard that one of the problems of trying to figure out what happened is due to that facial recognition stuff not being nearly as good as it was sold to us as being. They said it’s fairly easy to trick it by some fairly simple subterfuges. I strongly suspect that some of the paranoia out there is due to an absurdly unrealistic faith in the omnipotence of computer technology and, especially, that artificial “intelligence” that faith is based in.

Last year or so the program On the Media had on a woman who described some rather simple but effective ways that honest leakers could avoid being traced as they leaked information to the media. It was a bit more complicated than sending stuff over the phone, requiring such inconveniences as setting up meetings and meeting face to face and turning off computers once in a while, which, apparently, are too much like work for people as sophisticated as Snowden and Greenwald to have practiced. I think a lot of the paranoia is due to people being too lazy to do those kinds of old fashioned things.

The ocean is big, Malaysia was, obviously, not especially careful and India’s bureaucracy is a rolling disaster. I’m not surprised an airliner could disappear.